Audacity Portable Support

Many of the most common issues that arise when using Audacity Portable are addressed here. Please read through the various topics
to see if any of them address your question. You can also post a question in the Audacity Portable Support Forum.

General Audacity Issues

Installing Audacity Portable

To install Audacity Portable, just download the portable package at the top of the Audacity Portable page and then double-click it. Select the location you wish to install to and click OK. A AudacityPortable directory will be created there and all the necessary files installed. That's all there is to it.

Using Audacity Portable

To start up Audacity Portable, just double-click AudacityPortable.exe file where you installed Audacity Portable on your portable drive. Then, use it just like you would a local copy of Audacity. There are a couple of things to keep in mind:

Removing Your Drive - When you're done, exit Audacity and then wait for the activity light on your removable drive to stop flashing. Then select the 'Safely remove [device]' option from the icon in the system tray. If you remove the drive while it is writing, you may lose data.

Upgrading Audacity Portable

To upgrade to a newer version of Audacity Portable, just download a new copy and unzip it to your portable drive, right over the previous version. Your settings will not be altered.

Adding LAME MP3 and FFMPEG Support

To add FFMPEG support to Audacity, download the alternate zip for Windows package from the Audacity website and unzip it. Extract all files to AudacityPortable\App\FFMPEG. After starting Audacity Portable, go to Edit - Preferences. Select Libraries. Click Locate under FFmpeg Import/Export Library. A box will appear saying that the library has been automatically located and asking if you still want to locate it manually. Select No. Click OK in Audacity preferences.

Change Audacity Portable to Another Language

By default, Audacity Portable is set to English. To change to another langauge, start Audacity Portable as normal. From the main menu, select Edit and then Preferences. Then click the Interface tab. From the dropdown, select your language of choice and then click ok. Close Audacity Portable and then start it again for your change to take effect.

Running from a CD (Audacity Portable Live)

Support for running from a CD is built into Audacity Portable. Just extract it to a local drive and run it at least once to generate a set of default settings. Next, make any configuration changes you'd like. Finally, burn the whole AudacityPortable directory to CD being sure not to change the locations of any files.

Known Issues

The following are known issues with this package:

Trojan/Virus detected - AntiVir and Avast, on more than one occasion, have claimed there is a trojan or virus in the launcher. This is due to poor trojan detection in both products that will occasionally mis-identify many NSIS-based applications as trojans. It will usually occur after a definitions update. You should contact your antivitus provider and let them know of their mistake.

Modifications

I made some modifications to the default version of Audacity to make it more USB key friendly (decreasing total install size and the number of writes to the drive, which will increase drive life). These changes are listed here so you'll know what they are, and so you can recreate the process, if so desired.

EXEs and DLLs Compressed - All EXEs and DLLs were recompressed using UPX. This gets our installed
size down to one that is a bit more manageable. The options used were: --best --compress-icons=0 --nrv2d --crp-ms=999999 -k

Local Temp - The temp directory is placed on the local PC within the %TEMP% directory. If there are no problems, it is removed when you exit Audacity Portable. If Audacity does not close correctly, you will be asked whether you would like to delete the files or leave them so you can restart Audacity Portable and attempt to recover your work.